Chris Reeve’s Son Is Running NYC Marathon for Dad's Cause

Will Reeve is raising money for his parents' foundation
By Polly Davis Doig,  Newser Staff
Posted Nov 1, 2016 2:02 PM CDT
Chris Reeve’s Son Is Running NYC Marathon for Dad's Cause
In this May 7 1996, file photo, Christopher Reeve speaks during a convention in Baltimore.   (AP Photo/Gary Sussman, File)

If anyone should breeze through the New York City Marathon on Sunday, it's Superman's kid, right? And yet Will Reeve sounds a little anxious about running his first 26.2-miler, with the only son of Christopher and Dana Reeve telling the New York Post that he's said for years he'd run the event "next year." Well, 2016 is "next year." Says the 24-year-old ESPN reporter, who sits on the board of the eponymous foundation his parents started: "Finally I realized, 'What kind of example am I setting when many of the people in the spinal-injury world for whom I advocate would do anything just to be able to step up to the starting line?' "

Reeve is making the run with both parents firmly in mind: He's raised about $30,000 of his $35,000 goal for the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation, which raises money for spinal cord injury research. Christopher Reeve died in 2004, almost a decade after being paralyzed in a fall off a horse; Dana Reeve died a year and a half later of non-smoking-related lung cancer, leaving Will Reeve an orphan at age 13. "I’m running for them. I’m running for the millions of Americans living with paralysis," says their son, who recounts seeing "my dad rising at dawn for hours of physical therapy and training, all in service of a tiny flame of hope that he might walk again." People notes the message on Team Reeve's marathon jerseys: "Finish More Than A Race." (Christopher Reeve's daughter, Alexandra, also honored dad when she named her firstborn.)

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